


Deuterocanon

by pendrecarc



Category: Alias Grace (TV)
Genre: Cunnilingus, Dubious Consent, F/F, First Time, Non-Penetrative Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 11:43:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19272586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: "I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely."





	Deuterocanon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SoundandColor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoundandColor/gifts).



I told you of the painting on the wall of Mr. Kinnear’s bedroom. There was a painting put up in Nancy’s room, too. A very queer sort of painting, especially I thought for a woman’s bedroom where she might expect to find some peace of mind. Although on reflection I do not think it was Nancy who had it hung there.

I asked Mr. Kinnear about it once, Nancy having proven herself unreliable in such matters. He said the woman in the painting was, like Susannah, not quite from the Bible. He told me her name was Judith, and she had through great bravery saved the lives of her people. The man whose severed head she held by the hair was called Holofernes, to whose tent she had gone in the night to commit first fornication and then murder. But Mr. Kinnear also said these sins were counted to her as righteousness.

That painting and I stared at one another as I brushed out Nancy’s hair. Mr. Kinnear was away, and as she sometimes did Nancy had asked me to sleep with her, so we had gone into her room and were beginning to undress for the night. She had the same long, dark hair as Judith, a little thicker than Mary’s had been. The brush running through it let the scent of her pomade into the room. When I lifted it off her neck to brush underneath I saw the outline of her spine under her skin, and as I had sometimes done with Mary I ran the back of my fingers along it, bumping up and down like a cart over an uneven road.

“That feels very nice, Grace,” she said in that soft manner of hers. “Did your mother brush your hair like you’re doing for me?”

“Sometimes she did. And I have younger sisters whose hair I used to brush as well.”

“Will you braid it for me before bed? It is such a rare comfort to be touched in this way.” She turned her head a little to the side so the hair fell back and I could see the whole curve of her ear and the long drop of gold hanging down from it. “And take these out for me, if you would.” The earrings were warm to the touch from her skin, and the lobes of her ears were as soft as a hen’s breast before plucking. But they were a little reddened around the holes from the wires, and I rubbed them gently to ease the ache. She sighed at this and leaned into my hand until I took it away.

She kept her earrings in a small wooden jewelry box at her bedside next to a carved ivory comb and a silver hand mirror that was somewhate less elegant than Mr. Kinnear’s own. I have dusted boxes like that and polished silver enough to make a good judgment of their worth, as I have washed perfume out of the gowns of fine society ladies, scrubbed grease and vegetable stains from the cuffs of cooks’ sleeves, and rinsed soot from the petticoats of maids like myself. I know the soiling common to the clothes of every class of woman and the quality of the fabrics that sustain it. I know now, and I knew then as well as Nancy herself did, the sort of woman who should have worn those earrings and looked into that mirror, and that woman was neither a housekeeper nor the wife of a man like Mr. Kinnear.

I knew very well by then whose bed she stayed in on those nights I slept in my own, and she in turn must have been aware that I knew, but we did not at that time or ever afterward acknowledge this to one another. She was hot and cold to me, and I was almost used to it. I thought if I ever did say anything on that subject it would be only cold from then on, and though I had no wish to put my happiness in anyone else’s power I was as starved for female company as Nancy had once told me she was herself.

It seemed she was going to be hot that night, and I was glad of it, much though I wished not to be.

She took my own hair out of its cap herself and brushed it back across my shoulders, though she made no offer to braid it for me. She did help me with my stays. Her fingers were very smooth against my skin. Mine were red over the knuckles and where I held the brooms, and callused. When I began to help her with my chemise and they brushed over her shoulders she stopped me and took them in her own fingers. “Oh, your poor hands,” she said, very attentive, but I did not think particularly sorry for it. She stroked each callous the way I had stroked her earlobes, and I thought how many months of easy work it must have taken and how many hours of rubbing lotion into her hands before they no longer showed the work that had once been hers and was now mine.

It had been a warm day, but a chill often settled into the air after dusk, and that was the kind of night we had. Nancy giggled like a girl much younger than I was when we scrambled under the covers. I was going to blow out the light, but she stopped me and smiled. I don’t know if you ever saw a picture of her, Doctor. I don't believe her likeness was ever taken. But she had the sort of lip that is called a Cupid’s Bow, and the skin above it was golden in the candlelight. It was hard not to stare at her lips when she smiled.

“Don’t put it out just yet,” she said. “I want to look at you while we talk. It is so good to have you here, Grace.”

Her pillows were as soft as any I had touched in any of the bedrooms I had ever cleaned. I thought if I did not mind myself and be careful I could sink right through them and keep going down to whatever lay beneath them. But of course I knew what lay beneath, and had swept under that bed dozens of times, so it was a foolish thought for me to have. "What do you want to talk about?”

She laughed. “Oh anything. Tell me about where you came from, Grace.”

“About Ireland?”

“Yes, about that.”

I didn’t want to tell her about Ireland, of which I remembered very little but for my father and mother and brothers and sisters, none of whom I had seen in so long. And I didn’t want to tell her about the life I had lived immediately after we had arrived in Canada. So I said instead, “Or I could tell you about the place I had with the Parkinsons, before I came to you and Mr. Kinnear.” I don’t know if it was that she truly didn’t care what I talked about, or that she liked the way I paired her name with Mr. Kinnear’s as though she really was the mistress of the household, but she blinked slow and sweet and let me start talking about the Parkinsons’ place. I didn’t speak of how things ended, of Mr. George Parkinson or how I lost my only friend in the world, because those were not things to share with Nancy even had I not been worried they would remind her of her own situation.

I told her about the way the summer sun fell across the drawing room in the early mornings when we were the only ones awake in the whole house, and my first sips of claret drunk at Mary’s urging in a stolen moment during one of Mrs. Parkinson’s dinners, and the time and effort I went to in secret to make that needle case. These were pleasant things to think of and made my voice come thick and heavy like honey in my throat. Nancy’s smile began to fade and her eyelashes to droop, and I thought for certain she was falling asleep and I would have the bed to myself and my own thoughts, with only the quiet sounds and the faint smell of wine from her breathing. For even with Mr. Kinnear away she had insisted we bring a jug up from the cellars, and had drunk a great deal of it herself to make up for the glasses that would have been his.

But when I stopped speaking at last her eyes blinked open again, though very slow and sleepy. She reminded me of a cat in the sun, like the one who caught mice in the stables and liked to sleep on the veranda on hot afternoons, but would stretch and look up at me if I came too close. “What a restful voice you have, Grace,” she said. “And it is so sweet to hear you speak of your friend. Is this the same old friend you told me about once before?”

“It is.”

“And you say you shared a bed with her, as we are doing now. Did you stay up late into the night and talk like this?”

“We did, almost every night.” Though not with a light burning, because we would have been scolded for using up the candles. And not good beeswax like the ones Nancy kept on every table in her own rooms, but common tallow which produce more smoke and an unpleasant scent.

“And when you were done talking,” Nancy said, but very low, “did she sometimes reach across the bed for you?”

“Sometimes, yes. We held each other when it was very cold, or when one of us had been sad or lonely.”

Her hand was creeping toward me across the bed. I could see it moving under the quilt. She had been at the piano most of the afternoon, her music wafting out of the open windows into the yard where I was at the washing, and when her fingers touched me through the nightdress I thought of the ivory keys, which moved under her fingertips like the flesh of my hip and my belly when she pressed against it.

When I told you about this I could see in your face that you’d never have thought to ask about it, though you asked me more than once about intimacy with men. Is it so far removed from the things you can believe, Doctor? Is the very notion of two women in bed together, and what they might occupy themselves with other than talk and sleep, as difficult to imagine as the tasks that occupy a maid’s hands from sunup to sunset?

I don’t blame you for this, either. Again I suppose it is how you were raised and how most men are raised, regardless of their station. It strains your understanding of the world to think we might have things of importance to do in your absence.

So let me tell you what it's like, and you may judge for yourself whether it is indeed a thing of importance as you like to reckon it. I have said Nancy Montgomery’s hands were not like the hands of a common maid, and they were not even very much like the hands of a housekeeper. I could look at any woman’s palms and tell you how recently she has scrubbed floors or beat carpets. But this is where my understanding of her hands ends. I couldn’t tell you whether familiarity with a broom or a piano is more likely to teach you the way to touch the body of another woman.

I can tell you that Nancy knew it very well. She may not have touched me before that night, and I could have told her a hundred small ways to do it better, but still it was very good, and better than my own cold hands in a lonely bed.

She took my nightdress just above the hip and began to gather the fabric into her fist. I did not at first understand what she was doing and did not help her in any way, so that when she had pulled the hem up from my ankles to my knees it stuck and came no further. She smiled again and I saw not for the first time that she had very nice, white teeth, and very even; though one of her front teeth was turned a little, so the outer edge came further forward than the inner and made a deep shadow. “I will not tolerate laziness in a maid. Are you going to make me do all the work myself?” she asked, and then I understood what she was doing and was not certain what to say in reply. So I said nothing at all, and only shifted my hips so she could pull the nightdress over them and gather it at my waist, and then she loosed it so her hands were free for other things.

“You have such a lovely figure, Grace,” she said, exploring the curves of my side with her palm spread flat and open. “I think it’s a pity to hide it under rough dresses and aprons.” I’d never heard her say a thing like that before, though it was the sort of statement Mr. Kinnear had made to her, and often, though they did not know he made it in my hearing. She had not appreciated such sentiments when he was the one voicing them.

“Not all of us have the money or the use for fine muslin,” I told her, feeling as I did so that it might change the mood in the room, and not knowing whether I wished it to or not.

But she was not offended. “I suppose you don’t.” Her touch moved from my side to the skin of my belly, which never having been exposed to sun or used in my daily tasks was one of the softest parts of me and unused to the familiarity with which she approached it, and I squirmed a little at the patterns she began to trace there. “Are you so ticklish? You can laugh, Grace—I would like to see you smile more. You don’t need to be always so formal. It is one thing with Mr. Kinnear and his guests, or out in public. But it is quite different here, when it is just the two of us alone together and we may speak or laugh or weep without being heard. There is a rare luxury in the company of other women. You must have felt this when you were alone with your old friend.”

Certainly I had felt it with Mary, but I did not say so, because it was not a luxury I had in Nancy’s company. With Mary I hadn't needed to guard or hide myself, not ever—except on one or two occasions when I tried to hide the degree of joy or sorrow I felt for or because of her. With Nancy I often knew I must hide the very fact of joy or sorrow, not to speak of my anger or fear. I have heard men who work with dogs and horses explain how an animal can sense these feelings and that you must not let them show, and must pretend them away until they are gone in truth. It is a lesson that may be applied equally well to the guards at a prison or the audience in a courtroom, or to the fine ladies in the Governor’s dining room. You may consider for yourself whether it applied to you, Doctor.

So I smiled, but I did not laugh. I did not feel very much like laughing. I did feel an urge to close my eyes and lean into her touch, and those things I did gladly enough. She had trimmed her fingernails only that morning, which I knew because I had cleaned the stray cuttings from under her dressing table. She must have been over-hasty with it and had left one edge very sharp. When she turned her hand over to caress me with the back of it this scratched in a way that was painful, but not so painful that I wished to flinch away from her. I thought that if she wanted to she would have been able to make it very painful indeed. And it came to me that flinching away from her might have been a way to guarantee that she would want to.

I was glad when she reached farther under my nightdress, because it was the underside of her palm and the smooth parts of her fingertips that she used to trace my ribs, as I had run my own hands between the bones of her stays before I helped her out of them. And then that same smoothness finding its way to the heaviness under my breasts, which moved with my own breath and were beginning to move more quickly. “And you must have felt this,” she said. Her face was very close now, her head resting as much on my pillow as on her own. Her eyes were brown, but even in the candlelight they were not so dark as Mary’s, and when I opened my own again I saw they had had shades of red and gold buried in them. She liked me to look at her and rewarded it by drawing the pad of her thumb up along my breast. We were so close, and my flesh was so tender and alert, that now I could feel what still remained of her callouses, so I learned that some things could not be smoothed away by sweet-smelling lotions. “So soft,” she said. “You are exactly like a peach, so sweet and warmed all over from the sun. I would like to eat you right up, Grace. May I?”

“May you eat—?” But I did not get the question out, because she had leaned forward so her lips just touched mine.

“Like that,” she said, so close I could almost taste the wine as well as smell it. When she spoke her lips felt like I think bees must, hovering over the surface of a flower just before they landed. Or over a peach. “Just like that.” Then she kissed me.

And I said to you, I suppose you will want to know whether I kissed her back. Well, to tell you the truth, Doctor, I did.

I remember the way you looked when I told you about that. The way you blushed and held your notebook more tightly in your lap, and would not meet my eye. I apologized, if I remember right, and said I did not mean to offend or to embarrass you. How young and naive did you think I was, after so long in the Penitentiary? All I did was let you embarrass yourself.

She kissed me as her thumb moved across my breast and raised gooseflesh there. And I kissed her back, and her fingernails teased at the little cleft between my ribs and my breast. Then she said, “Come now, this is very selfish of you. Do you mean to lie back and make me do all the work?” So I began to pull at her nightdress and to loosen the neck, but she shook her head. “No, no, not there. Down _here_ , or didn’t that friend of yours teach you anything?” And she took her hand from my breast so she could grab at mine and thrust it down where it was wanted, which was at that place where a woman’s legs come together and we lack the thing you were trying to hide under your notebook, Doctor, when I told you what Nancy Montgomery did to me.

She pushed my fingers between her legs and rubbed them against her through the nightdress, which was already growing damp. “There,” she said, “there, now you see. You have such clever hands. Have I told you that, Grace? I have admired the way they are with a needle. It is such a shame they spend all day scraping slop and doing the washing. Really you—oh, oh yes, you see very well.” And she opened her legs and trapped my hand between them, holding me with her thighs, and began to move her legs back and forth like a pair of scissors, with my hand at the join.

When you wash a person’s clothes you learn the scent of their body, whether you want to or not. This is only a fact. I knew very well what Nancy’s perfume smelled like, and knew better than that what her sweat smelled like after a hot day, and even knew by now the darker scent of her drawers though she liked to daub a bit of perfume on those as well. The perfume had mostly come off in the heat of the day, or had all rubbed off onto the shift she had left in the corner for me to clean up. It was only Nancy I could smell now, and it was only Nancy I could hear. She made little sounds in her throat and they weren’t so unlike the sounds I myself made, alone in my bed, and this made me wonder whether fine ladies and maids and seamstresses and beggars on street corners are all the same in this, the way we are in other base pursuits. I cannot say if that was a radical thought for me to have had, or whether it becomes less political with my hand between her legs and her breasts beginning to rub against my body with only our nightdresses between us. I suppose it would have been a more radical thought if she was not only the housekeeper, but Mr. Kinnear’s wife in truth. But it was Nancy I was with, Nancy who didn’t know about politics and didn’t ask.

She liked what I did with my hand. I can tell you that for certain. Have you ever heard what a woman sounds like when you’ve really pleased her? I don’t suppose that’s one of the things they teach you in medical school, though perhaps it does come up when you learn how our bodies are different from yours. Because they must teach you about that, or you would not be able to diagnose the nervous complaints I’m told are peculiar to my sex, or tell when we are in what you like to call a ‘delicate condition’, or to correct those things. The nerves, by binding us to chairs until we scream. The delicate condition by ripping it from us and leaving us to bleed and shake to death of fever in our own beds.

It might be as well if none of you had ever learned any of it.

If you ever learned it, though, you know what I heard that night from Nancy, and you’ll understand why I couldn’t help but kiss her. Not on her mouth, which I wanted to keep doing what it was doing, but on her bare throat which was very warm and soft and through which I could feel the beating of her heart. I thought, how good it is, to lie beside another person and know she is alive. And it filled me with a strange and rather stupid fury that it was Nancy whose heart beat like that. So I opened my mouth over the place where I could feel it, so it beat against my lips and my tongue. And I bit down against it, just a little.

Nancy pushed down hard on my hand at that, so I could feel her heart _there_ , too. But then she grabbed me by the hair and pulled me away from her neck. “No marks,” she said. “You mustn’t leave any marks, you stupid girl, don’t you know that?”

So I bit down on the collar of her nightdress instead, which was not quite as good for either of us. To make up for that I rolled toward her so I could put one of my legs over her and press closer and so benefit myself from the efforts of my hand to please her. She had indeed said I had clever fingers, and though I do try not to commit the sin of vanity it was something I had heard before from other people and secretly thought myself. And I do think it took some cleverness to do what I did for her then even through the nightdress, while still trying to address my own concerns, which were becoming more pressing the more she panted and writhed against me. But I made better work of her concerns than my own, and soon she was sitting away from me, pulling back her hair which had mostly fallen out of the neat braid I had put it into.

“You are such a good girl,” she said, as though she had not just called me a stupid one. “Good and hardworking, and that sort of effort deserves a reward. Would you like your reward now?”

My answer would have been yes regardless, but again she did not wait for it. She began to claw at my nightdress, pulling it farther and farther up, and at the same time she herself crawled down on the bed so she could reach what she wanted, which was the part of me that needed her most. It was her mouth she used, her mouth with that Cupid’s bow, bending over me with her knees just to one side of my shoulders and her weight pressed down against me. I was trapped beneath her in much the same way you would trap a moth between your hand and the table, while deciding whether you meant to crush it or pick it up and set it loose in the yard.

She leaned heavier into me as she worked, and for all I could scarcely breathe I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. I could not see her face but I could imagine it very well, because I had seen her tip back her throat to drink Mr. Kinnear’s best wine and raise a crust of fresh bread to her mouth all slathered with my fresh-churned butter, and seen her lick pork-grease from her fingers when she had stolen a slice out from under my carving knife. The way she licked and suckled now told me she liked this every bit as much.

You never asked me if I liked it, Doctor. I don’t think you trusted yourself to speak when I told you this part.

I can’t blame you for that, to tell the truth. I couldn’t do very much myself while she did this, only try to breathe and push my feet up and down the sheets under the quilt. I squeezed my legs very tight around her head but she didn’t stop even for a minute, so it must not have hurt.

On my own I never had the strength to do her much harm, you see.

I shook and I trembled, and it was all her doing. Then I was all melted like an aspic left out in the sun. Only then did I start to care again about breathing, and the difficulty of doing so with Nancy pressed over me like that.

She moved finally, but she took her time about it. When she’d righted herself in the bed she wiped at her chin with the back of her hand. “What a fine mess you’ve made of my bed.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and for a moment I really was, because I’d never been so wet there before, and could not tell how much of it was me and how much of it was from her mouth. Which was now very red and swollen. She did not offer to kiss me again with it.

“Never mind,” she said, while I was still considering whether I wanted her to. “You must do the washing tomorrow in any case.” She was still breathing very heavy, but slow now. Every breath parted the neck of her nightgown a little. It was ripped from where I had bitten it, but of course that was all right, because the mending was my work as well.

She lay back down beside me with her face to the ceiling. The sweat made her hair even darker, and her skin wasn’t gold or cream any more but patched with scarlet, like the roses she had brought in that afternoon. I had a sudden wild fancy to see my own face in that moment, but of course I could not, until she said, “Go put out the candle now, Grace,” and I had to remind my legs what they were for before they could lift me up from the bed and carry me over to the table.

I bent toward the candle and as I did so my face moved into the mirror. It was like the face of a wild thing, not so much in its expression but due to the red hair falling in tangles all around it. I might as well not have bothered to brush and plait it at all. But I would have, even if I had known what would happen to it. When you spend your life fixing the messes of others, Doctor, you have a choice to make: you may give yourself over to contempt for the nice trappings of civilization, for which we servants fight tooth and nail every day against the threat of rot and dirt and dust and all the problems the world outside our houses and our bodies inside them are determined to cause.

Or you accept the work that is given you to do, and know that the task you complete today will be new again for you to begin tomorrow. So even we maids brush our hair until it shines and make our beds neat beneath their faded quilts.

“Don’t stare at yourself like that, Grace,” said Nancy from her bed. “It is unbecoming of a maid to be so vain.”

I leaned obediently down and blew out her candle. In the last bit of light it gave it was not my own face I saw in the mirror, but the painted face of Judith, still watching with her parted lips and heavy eyes.


End file.
